College Project Inspired LeAnne’s Cookies Into Successful Local Business

Award-winning LeAnne’s Old Fashioned Cookies, is a truly home-grown success story.
Owner LeAnne Crabtree was as a Finance major at the University of Central Florida, one of the required marketing projects was to plan and set up a business, market the product, keep accurate records and report any profits or losses the business generated. Since Crabtree has always enjoyed making cookies, she used her family’s fourth generation secret chocolate chip recipe and set up her marketing class cookie business.

Her cookies were an instant hit with college students, professors, neighbors and friends, who gladly bought all the cookies she could produce. Her marketing project made a profit and the demand for “LeAnne’s Old Fashioned Cookies” continued even though her professor gave her a “C” on the project. He assumed people were becoming too health conscious and wouldn’t buy cookies, however, the demand for LeAnne’s cookies continued.

Working as a part time cashier for an Orlando grocery store, Crabtree made friends with the owners of a nearby pizza shop. Soon they offered to let she and her husband make cookies in their pizza ovens after hours. She always baked extra cookies and left them for the owners to enjoy.

In 1990, graduation day finally arrived. With her Finance Degree in hand, Crabtree, her family and the young cookie company moved to Seffner, Florida (a small town east of Tampa).

Daughter Amanda quickly joined the cookie team as ‘Client Relations Specialist” when she was just two-weeks old. Later that year the company won the “The Greater Brandon Chamber of Commerce, Small Business of the Year for 1999’.

Amanda, now in college, continues to have a loyal following of clients she has developed and nurtured over the years.

Crabtree continues to work with individuals and businesses giving them, ‘A Delicious way to say Thank You’.